Right now, there are 94 acres of shoreline beaches within Santa Barbara City limits; by the year 2100, 66 sandy waterfront acres of that will be gone, gobbled up by sea-level rise, triggered by climate change. That’s according to a draft report that details the impacts of rising sea levels on Santa Barbara between now and the end of the century.
The report, prepared for City Hall by consulting firm ESA, assumed that greenhouse emissions would proceed at their current rate without significant reduction. Its inventory of impacts also assumed that City Hall took no steps to mitigate or protect itself in the intervening years. Based on a medium-high risk scenario, the consultants concluded the sea level would rise by 2.5 feet between now and 2060 and by 6.6 feet by the year 2100. That will trigger a steady increase in tidal inundation that will have a profound effect on the shape and size of Santa Barbara coastal areas, public spaces, and municipal infrastructure located south of Highway 101.
The most obvious victim of all this will be the city’s bluff-backed beaches, such as Arroyo Burro and Leadbetter. Those beaches will be caught in a pincer action between the coastal bluffs and the encroaching tides and storm surges. By the year 2060, the ESA report suggested bluff-backed beaches might lose as much as 76 percent of their width. By 2100, they’d be 98 percent gone. Arroyo Burro would dwindle from its current width of 94 feet to 33 feet in 2060 and to zero by 2100. Shoreline Park will go from 30 feet to nothing. Low-lying beaches will hardly be immune. East Beach, the report indicated, will morph from its current width of 280 feet to 183 feet in 2060 to 32 in 2100.